Thomas Monk

“ The only question now was where the man who was worth a trial to gain should be employed. There was a general impression that he should go to Devonshire, where his eldest brother, Sir Thomas, was doing good work. But Monk made difficulties. A civil war in his native county was peculiarly distasteful to a man of his nature. Besides, his heart was not there. He had left it with the regiment that was devoted to him, and that was now, with the rest of the Irish brigade, investing Nantwich under Lord Byron. ”

“ It was a fixed maxim in this reign, as well as in some of the subsequent, that no native of the island should ever be advanced to any dignity, ecclesiastical, civil, or military [k] The king, therefore, upon Stigand's deposition, promoted Lanfranc, a Milanese monk, celebrated for his learning and piety, to the vacant see. This prelate was rigid in defending the prerogatives of his station; and after a long process before the pope, he obliged Thomas, a Norman monk, who had been appointed to the see of York, to acknowledge the primacy of the Archbishop of Canterbury. ”

“ I am not defending the monastic system, or the corruption of the cloister—far from it. I would see the usefulness of man made manifest to the world; but the measure of my faith teaches charity and forgiveness, and I can find in the functions of the monk much that must have been useful in those dark days of feudal tyranny and lordly despotism. We much mistake the influence of the monks by mistaking their position ”

“ There was a time when they used to sing in the forest round the old Abbey Himmerode, as they now do in the valley of Honnef.
The pious monks, walking about in the cloister gardens in holy contemplation heard their seductive songs: the penitents in their cells, mortifying the flesh heard them also. Their alluring warble mingled itself with their murmured prayers; and in the heart of many a monk, who had long since renounced the world and its pleasures, the remembrance of them was gently awakened, and sweet sinful things were whispered into the holy brother's ears. ”

“ CLOISTERS OF MONTSERRAT.
All this may still be seen and heard now and then, but with the number of monks sadly curtailed. It is said that they now never exceed twenty. When their day of persecution came they escaped to their mountain fastness, climbing higher and ever higher like hunted deer, hiding in the cracks and crevices of the rocks; fear giving them strength to reach parts never yet trodden by the foot of man, whilst many a less active monk slipped and fell into the bottomless abyss, his last resting place, like that of Moses, remaining for ever unknown. ”

“ The successive reforms, Clugny, Carthusians, Cistercians, beginning in poverty and ending in wealth and worldly influence, show what sort of men wore the cowl. The monks were not all alike; some were worldly, some were religious, some were scholars, and some were merely indolent. The monastery was a home for the scholar, a refuge for the disconsolate, and an asylum for the disgraced. And a monk might often be a man whose sensibilities, instead of being dull, were more sharply awake than our own to-day. ”

“ Its dreamy asceticism, its gloomy cells, are gone. Its unworldly motives, its stern allegiance to duty, its protest against self-indulgence, its courage and sincerity, will ever constitute the potent energy of true religion. Its ministrations to the broken-hearted, and its loving care of the poor, must ever remain as a shining example of practical Christianity. In the simplicity of the monk's life, in the idea of "brotherhood," in the common life for common ends, a Christian democracy will always find food for reflection. ”

“ Many bishops and priests were little better than the nobles, yet the Church preserved Christian belief and did something to improve morality. Everywhere the monk was the most striking object-lesson, with his austerities, his terror-stricken sense of sinfulness, and conviction of the peril of the world. No martial, grasping bishop, no dissolute and treacherous priest denied that the monk’s was the ideal Christian life; and the laity stood in awe, or expectation, of the wonder-working power of his asceticism. ”

“ Slowly, slowly, its legs labored through the thin sand. At last it stopped some six inches from Monk's face.
It appeared immense, like a lumbering, scaly giant from the planet's billion-year-ago past.
It rubbed its claws together, threateningly. Its black mouth opened, closed, opened, closed. Its needle tongue twisted like a silver snake.
I am hungry, came the thought. So very hungry. But I should call the others.
Combined fear and hope hung over Monk like an omnipresent shower of fire and ice. Sweat dripped into his hot eyes, obscuring his vision. ”

“ Cromwell has thus allowed us more than ten times to penetrate into his very soul, when one would have conceived that soul to be enveloped in triple brass, as Horace had it. But Monk! Oh, sire, God defend you from ever having anything to transact politically with Monk. It is he who has given me, in one year, all the gray hairs I have. Monk is no fanatic; unfortunately he is a politician; he does not overflow, he keeps close together. For ten years he has had his eyes fixed upon one object, and nobody has yet been able to ascertain what. ”

“ Opposite me, at the table of the convent refectory, had sat a taciturn monk, whose influence I felt from the first day—a stronger consciousness of his presence, that is to say, than of any one of the other monks—though he did not seem particularly to observe me, and till recently had scarce spoken to me at all. He was a man of perhaps fifty years of age, with the countenance of one who had suffered and gained a victory of contemplation—a look as if no suffering could be new to him, and before whom no riddle of human vicissitudes could stay unread ”

“ The monks were the fiercest champions of orthodoxy, and the intellectual giants of that age, like Jerome and St. Augustine, were in their ranks. The monk rather than the priest was the apostle of the Middle Ages who taught men and nations the simple Christian life of the Gospel. In monasticism were developed the germs of many humanitarian institutions through which Christianity expressed itself in a most practical manner. The monastery offered a home to the poor and unfortunate, and gave hope and refuge to both the religious invalid, who was sick of the world, and to the religious fanatic. ”

“ One cannot conceive a married monk, nor one in the full enjoyment of his worldly fortune, nor one without a superior, except where he lives altogether alone with God, following His inspirations; and even then the bishop of the locality is always recognised by the Church as the Superior, whom he is bound to obey.
With these essential means of perfection were also combined silence, prayer and labour, whether manual or mental. Idleness is unknown to the monastic state; the monk should be always doing something pleasing to God. ”

“ But all honor to his manes and to his memory! for how much that is admirable in the human character—how much sweet and virtuous humility was hid in him, in the strict retirement of the cloister. The writings of that humble monk outlive the fame of many a proud ecclesiastic or haughty baron of his day; and well they might, for how homely does his pen record the simple annals of that far distant age. Much have the old monks been blamed for their bad Latin and their humble style ”

“ There is probably no better refutation of the expression so often heard from those who know nothing about it, with regard to the supposed laziness of the Monks of the Middle Ages, than this chapter of the story of their exploration and missionary labors during the Thirteenth Century. It is usually supposed that if a Monk was fat he could not possibly have accomplished any serious work in life. Some of these men were valde ponderosi, very weighty, yet they did not hesitate to take on themselves these long journeys to the East. ”

“ Years came and went, other hands tended the lantern, till in the Revolution the light of the monks and the Order itself were swept away, and the monastery was laid in ruins. But the legend is even now held for truth by simple folk, that in Friar’s Rock the monk lives still, hearing always the eddying flood about him, that beats in upon his memory the story of his sin; and they say that with it mingles ever the cry of men in their last agony, and the cry is his name, thus kept continually before the Judge. ”

“ There was no religious hatred, except towards Turks and Saracens. The monk, in his narrowness and ignorance, may be repulsive to an enlightened age: he was not repulsive to his own, for he was not behind it either in his ideas or in his habits of life. In fact, the more repulsive the monk of the dark ages is to this generation, the more venerated he was by bishops and barons seven hundred years ago ”

“ For the same reason we find the consummate flower of sanctity—a Bernard or a Francis—and with the flower the fruit, and the seed which has sown Christianity in all lands; for monks have ever been the great missionaries. The soul of the monk who has done most for man has thus most included the womanly as well as the manly type of excellence. It has unity and devotedness. It has that purity which is not only {417} consistent with fervor, but in part proceeds from it. It shrinks not only from the forbidden, but from the disproportionate, the startling, and the abrupt. ”

“ The decrees of councils, the denunciations of popes and high ecclesiastical dignitaries, the satires of literature, the testimony of chroniclers and the formation of reformatory orders, constitute a body of irrefragable evidence proving that the lowest level of sensuality, superstition and ignorance had been reached. The monks and friars lost whatever vigor and piety they ever possessed.
It is again evident that a monk cannot serve God and mammon. Success ruins him. Wealth and popular favor change his character. ”

“ They do not seem likely to die in a hurry. Some of them would take the prizes in any human exhibition for fatness and sleekness. Their loose [Pg 97] and flowing robes of some cream-colored stuff, perhaps, impart an unreal fullness to their figures. One wonders if their lives are quite as austere as represented. The monk who piloted our party about is magnificent in physique. He stands about six feet two inches, as straight as an arrow, weighs fully two hundred pounds, has a winning, slightly sunburned Italian face, and is in manner a perfect gentleman. ”

“ If they do not sometimes pine and sigh for the busy haunts and the excitement of the great towns? Such questions are not easily answered, unless we get the answer in the fact that the monastic vows are faithfully and religiously kept; and there is no record of a Carthusian monk ever having broken his vow. Surely then there must be something strangely, even terribly attractive in that stern life which is so full of hardship and trial, and from year's end to year's end knows no change, until the great change which comes to us all, sooner or later, whether we be monks or revellers. ”

“ And doubtless the average monk, even when well-conducted himself and in a well-conducted monastery, was, like average men of every creed, rank, or occupation, a very common-place person, acting from very mixed and often very questionable motives; and valuing his shaven crown and his sheepskin cloak, his regular hours of prayer and his implicit obedience to his abbot, more highly than he valued the fear and the love of God. ”

“ Art toiled in the church, and whole generations of busy fingers worked patiently at the decoration of the temple of the Most High. The pale, thoughtful monk, upon whose brow genius had set her mark, wandered into the calm retirement of the library, threw back his cowl, buried himself in the study of philosophy, history, or divinity, and transferred his thoughts to vellum, which was to moulder and waste in darkness and obscurity, like himself in his lonely monk's grave, and be read only when the spot where he labored should be a heap of ruins, and his very name a controversy amongst scholars. ”

“ But with all his faults he is a great and noble figure, and as the supreme representative of a dying type, his career marks a transition to a newer, brighter and more progressive world, than the gloomy realm over which he had reigned so long as unquestioned sovereign. Yet it shows that the days of brute force were over, when a simple monk, whose singleness of purpose and zeal for righteousness were never so much as questioned, could rule with such astounding power over the minds of men. ”

“ Most of them are not priests, and those that are never have the care of souls outside their monastery. That is the business of the bishops and secular clergy. They are monks who have left all that. And they have no distinctions of orders. A monk is just a monk and needs no other name. ”

“ For in reference to the Romanists, a Popish Priest well knows that nothing more is necessary than for him to assert any absurdity, however gross or impossible, and attest it by the five crosses on his vestments, and his own superstitious vassal believes it with more assurance than his own personal identity. But the filling up and the concealment of the old apertures in the nunnery, by the order of the Roman Priests are scarcely less powerful corroborative proof of Maria Monk's delineations, than ocular and palpable demonstration. ”